Other browsers have had it for years, but Chrome is finally adding a “Reader mode” that strips down an online article to its most essential parts—images and text—to make it easier to read. The new feature, dubbed Distill, is currently a work in progress but is still worth trying out for full-time Chrome users.

1. Chrome For Mac Download
2. Reader Mode For Chrome
3. Firefox For Mac
4. Chrome For Mac Os X
5. Google Chrome For Mac

Here’s how I enabled the Distill feature in Windows 8.1.

Can I get Reader mode in Chrome? I tried chrome://flags/ but no luck. Getting Open in Safari option in Chrome’s Share menu would be OK as a workaround. Right now it’s copy url, open Safari, paste url. Firefox is my main desktop browser but not interested in it on iOS. I’d prefer Chrome be extended to perform this function, but I’m.

First, you’ll need to have Chrome pinned to your taskbar—a desktop shortcut would also work. If you haven’t pinned Chrome to your taskbar open Chrome, right-click the program’s icon and select “Pin this program to the taskbar.”

Chrome For Mac Download

Now shut down Chrome completely by opening up your system tray (the upward facing arrow on the far right of the taskbar), right-clicking the Chrome icon, and selecting Exit.

Next, right-click the big Chrome icon in the taskbar and highlight Google Chrome. (Don't click it yet!) It should be the third choice from the bottom. With the selection highlighted, right-click again and select Properties, as shown here.

Still with me? Good. That was the hard part.

A properties window is now open with the Shortcut tab selected. Under that tab you should see a label that says Target: and then a text-entry box. In the text entry box place your cursor after the last quotation mark, create a space, and then type in the following:

--enable-dom-distiller

Make sure you type that in exactly, with two dashes at the beginning. You can cut-and-paste the above text into the field if you'd like.

Next click Apply and then OK.

You’re done. It may seem like a lot of steps, but it only takes a few seconds.

Now open up Chrome and click the “hamburger” menu icon on the upper right side.There should be a new option that says “Distill page.” Select “Distill” when you’re viewing an article online and reading gets a whole lot easier.

The new feature is pretty bare bones right now and doesn’t include anything fancy like the ability to save articles to a “read later” list.

If you’re a Chrome user, but setting up distill mode is too much work, there are alternatives. Evernote fans can install an extension from the Chrome Web Store called Clearly that does the same thing and even lets you save stripped down articles to Evernote.

The modern UI (read: Metro) version of Internet Explorer 11 also comes with a reading mode button. The desktop version of IE does not contain the same feature, however, and IE has to be your default browser before you can access the modern UI version in Windows 8 and 8.1.

Google Chrome is a browser that is growing in popularity. I’ve recently switched to Chrome, myself.

There’s a lot to like about the Chrome browser:

• Fast
• Excellent bookmark handling
• Protected Mode (sandboxed) for more secure browsing and prevention of phishing attacks
• Built-in Google Sync to keep all your bookmarks synchronized across your computers

Chrome offers built-in basic PDF viewing and PDF conversion of web pages.

Nice as this sounds, Chrome can’t display every kind of PDF. When that happens, you’ll see this message

Chrome also lacks some of Reader (and Acrobat’s) navigational features such as Previous View and Next View.

Since Chrome is growing in popularity, of late I’ve received quite a few questions about PDF in Chrome:

• How do I get Adobe Reader (or Acrobat) to work in Google Chrome?
• How do I turn off the Chrome PDF viewer?
• Why does Chrome make huge PDFs?
• How do I get Chrome to print PDFs as text?

In this blog article, I’ll show you how to:

1. Use Adobe Reader (or Acrobat) as the default PDF Viewer in Chrome
2. How to create smaller, better quality PDFs from Chrome

Turning off Chrome’s Built-in PDF Viewer and using Adobe Reader or Acrobat instead

To turn off the Chrome PDF viewer, follow these steps:

1. Install Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat if it is not already installed
2. Open Google Chrome
3. In the address bar, type . . .
   about:plugins
   (that’s the word about a colon (:), then plugins
   
4. The Plug-ins Tab will open
5. Scroll down until you see either Adobe Acrobat or Reader.
   Click the Enable link
6. Close the Plug-ins tab and restart Chrome.

Better PDF Printing from Chrome

Reader Mode For Chrome

Chrome has some nice printing features such as a built-in page preview and an ink-saving black and white option.

Unfortunately, Chrome creates huge PDFs. In my testing on this page of my blog, the file size difference was astounding:

• Chrome-generated PDF: 11.8 MB
• Acrobat-generated PDF: 953K

On some web pages, Chrome also rasterizes the text creating image-only PDFs. This was always the case in previous versions of Chrome, but it appears to be fixed in the Chrome version I tested (15.0.874.121 m).

If you have Acrobat installed, you can instead print a compact 'electronic' PDF with searchable text.

Here’s how:

1. In Chrome, go to the web page you want to print
2. Type CTRL-P to open the Chrome print preview window
3. I the lower left corner of the window, click 'Print using system dialog'
   
4. In the Print window, choose the AdobePDF print driver, then click the Print button.
   

What’s the difference?

Firefox For Mac

I’ve highlighted the differences below, but in a nutshell:

Chrome For Mac Os X

• The Chrome PDF is more than ten times bigger
• The Chrome PDF isn’t searchable
• You can’t select text in the Chome-generated PDF
• View quality is impacted

Google Chrome For Mac